The Librain

In between taking part in the latest Your School Library Course, cataloguing loads of new stock, tweeting, going to a conference and planning the new library, I have also been trying out three Web2.0 tools! Ages ago, I uploaded our catalogue to LibraryThing and put two widgets on the Library Online website. However, I have also seen two other tools - Gurulib and Shelfari - which I thought might be interesting to try also.

I am not doing a detailed review of these sites, just commenting after a quick look and in terms of how useful they might be to school librarians who need a way of displaying or accessing their stock from their website.

Also, bear in mind that our library stock is very small at the moment - only 2700 items. Out of the three sites, only LibraryThing asked for a subscription as it has a limit of 500 items.

So, here are the results of trying these out:

LibraryThing
On the site, widgets are very customisable, which is nice. The issue I have is that if you upload old books, then LibraryThing puts in a generic cover, if it cannot find the real one. The generic cover is not very pretty! I have, however, been able to upload the catalogue complete with the keywords - which have gone in LibraryThing’s “tags” field. As I originally exported the catalogue records into Excel, I was able to add the Dewey number into the “tag” field as well. With some books, again old ones, it cannot find details, so they are not uploaded. You can do lots of activities on LibraryThing, such as add reviews, join groups and so on. I had thought of using the site for my Reading Group then realised that, as most of them are under 13, the site rules say that they cannot join. So I am using a wiki for this.

GuruLib

Recent books from My Library

powered by Gurulib

Gurulib seems to be a lot more basic than the other two, some of the books were not recognised, but uploading the file went very smoothly and more quickly than the other sites. I have not yet spent much time exploring the site.

Shelfari

An interesting thing about making the Shelfari widget is that you have the option to choose a tag - this would enable a lot of flexibility. The site did allow me to upload the entire catalogue, although I did have some problems initially with getting the upload to go on to the correct “shelf”! Again, I have the problem with the unrecognised books that ended up with weird covers - but if I had the time, I could scan in the real ones.

What do you think?

I am really looking forward to the next Your School Library Course, which starts on June 13th. The focus this time is on Web2.0 and Information Literacy. This list of presenters looks fabulous and I can’t wait to get started.

Your School Library on Netvibes

Presenters

• Information Literacy – The Most Basic of the Basics by Mike Eisenberg
• Power to the pupils!: a concept for information management and information literacy in the school library by Lourense H. Das
• Promoting Information Literacy in School Education through Collaboration between School and Parents by Dr. Siu Cheung Kong
• Information Literacy Teaching Methods by Miranda van Roosmalen and Kees Kok
• Warp and Weft: Weaving Web 2.0 into the School Library Program by Kate Reid
• Information Literacy 2.0 by Mihaela Banek Zorica and Sonja Špiranec
• Literacies in the Web 2.0 World by Daniel Churchill
• The SMMMART B Way of Teaching IL by Lourdes T David
• Information Literacy in the curriculum (includes Dutch version) by Albert K. Boekhorst
• Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 in Schools by Peter Godwin
• Developing Information Literacy in School: Being Strategic by Sharon Markless
• Developing a Culture for Information Literacy within the School Environment by Patricia Montiel Overall
• A series of four podcasts on Information Literacy by Donna DesRoches and Carlene Walters
• Using Wiki to Implement Guided Inquiry by Lee FitzGerald
• Next Generation User Skills by David Kay
• Assessing Information Literacy Outcomes by Lesley Farmer
• Information Literacy With YouTube by Dana Dukic
• Our Neighbourhood: Cedar Cottage by Nancy Campos, Janet Thompson, Pat Parungao
• The hitchhiker: Information Literacy and Web 2.0 by Roeland Smeets
• Promoting Information Literacy in School Education through Collaboration between School and Parents by Dr Siu Cheung Kong

Almost a year ago I wrote a post about how I was trying to pull together all of the web services that I was developing in my previous school. I had created a library website, a wiki, a blog and was developing sections of the school’s VLE to support teaching and learning through the library - I decided to call it all LRC Online Services.

Well, I have now reached a similar stage in my new job - very quickly it seems! We already have the following library sites:

• Library Online - the main library site
• Library_Online Twitter account - used to put news updates on to any of the library sites
• Library Online Netvibes pages - these have been created to house news feeds from France, Germany, China and the UK. Also, I am adding in Business and Sports news feeds
• Library Online Wiki - this is a private wiki for our Reading Group

I expect you are seeing the pattern here! Yes, I am branding all of these with Library Online in order to draw all of these services together.

I have played around a bit with Wordle and made these temporary logos. These are the colours of the refurbished library - I think the one on the left looks best!

I may open this as a competition at school later on - I am sure that the students can do a better job!

As we have recently had a lot of new members over on the Ning, I just want to write something more about it. First of all, it has not been made as a result of recent controversies over on SLN, but was created by Yin Doran (a.k.a. Elfin) after the fantastic online course that I blogged about ealier in the year.

I want to make this clear, because Yin has been generous enough to make me a fellow administrator, to help her with the Ning. My role, as I see it, is to support the development of it and assist new members to the Ning, if I can.

SLNers - A Network for school librarians in the UK

Membership

The Ning is owned by its members and they set the terms of who can join. All that has been said so far is that we do not want spammers or commercial members, so Yin and I ask prospective members to tell us something about themselves before we “approve” membership.

If anyone were to ask to join who we weren’t sure about, we would then ask the existing members to decide. We are not trying to be an elitist or exclusive club, but just protecting the Ning from spammers in the main.

Activities

Ning allows us to add discussions, groups and resources to be shared with members. Again, the entire membership will decide what they want on the Ning, but the general feeling so far is that, without being boring and humourless, we want to discuss and share things that will help us learn and develop as librarians.

So far, we have shared quite a lot of helpful things, such as Web2.0 tools, books that we enjoy, links with university libraries and book trailers. Members have uploaded photos and videos.

The US TeacherLibrarian Ning is a great example to follow - let’s enjoy learning together!

That was the last time I will ever stick my neck out on behalf of my profession. It wasn’t worth it. All that happened was total misunderstanding and a lot of nasty flack in my direction.

So I doubt that anything will some of it, except for me personally and professionally.

So, The Librain will shut up for a while as I have nothing more to say on here. Thanks to those who commented here and also who said something positive on SLN.

This is a message that I sent to SLN on Friday - it actually arrived on the list on Saturday evening as it had to go through moderation. This is because I left the list and re-joined a few days later.

Dear Colleagues,

This is most probably the very last time that I will write to you via SLN. You probably thought that I had left anyway, but I have been reading the posts on the Yahoo site for some time. I make no apologies for what I am about to say – I think that someone needs to say it. As I am well known for sticking my neck out, I will do so as I feel so strongly about SLN and all the support that it has given me over the ten years that I have been a member.

A large group of committed, professional and passionate school librarians is a wonderful thing. We support each other in a way that I think very few other professions do. We care about each other and try to help. We welcome new members to our profession and do everything we can to assist their development in what I believe is one of the most important roles in education.

Over the years I have been a member of SLN, members have given me so much – I don’t think that I could have achieved what I have without you. I have tried to repay that by sharing my own experience and expertise as much as I can. I hope people agree that I have been generous with my own ideas and knowledge gained through many years of experience, professional development and education. I have also joined in some of the fun stuff on SLN and feel that many of you are more than professional colleagues – we have a comradeship and friendship that has lasted for many years.

So, it is with great sadness that I have to write this. Today I am embarrassed to be a member of SLN. For the last few weeks a large group of members have been discussing off-list just how SLN has descended to a completely trivial and unprofessional level. There is a very large and wide membership including professional librarians from many sectors, commercial interests, international colleagues. It is totally shocking that they see UK school librarians discussing insect bites, Dewey numbers, and other low-level trivia!

Many of us are also shocked at how easily colleagues “give away” their hard earned knowledge and expertise. Before Easter, I was attacked on the list for suggesting that school librarians should have proper training to do their job. Professional qualifications were rubbished by one member. Yet, the list relies on a large group of expert librarians who readily share their professionalism with others. Let me state my belief firmly and unequivocally – school librarians need training! Yes, there are some brilliant people who do not have formal librarianship qualifications – but all of the best school librarians have had training of some kind – courses from SLA, SLG, local SLSs. Anne-Marie, Ingrid, Nikki – have all had some training!

This is from the description of SLN from the Yahoo site: “We aim to promote the professional standing of the school librarian, and encourage all unqualified school librarians to develop their skills and knowledge through relevant courses and qualifications. SLN is not itself a substitute for proper training.”

So why do so many of you continue to support SLN members who have no intention of doing any training? Why are you allowing their schools to get away with employing people with no knowledge of librarianship and then training them on SLN for free?

At the very least – have colleagues no fear that their headteachers will see this as the way forward? Are you all that secure in your jobs?

Good, committed and able school librarians are leaving this list in some numbers, others are now posting very infrequently. Is this what members want? If the main topics on the list are so trivial, the expertise will be driven away to other places where we can raise the level.

Those are my thoughts.

Farewell
Anne

This time I am looking at the Web2.0 tools that I use for collaboration. To focus myself, I am going to concentrate on those I use to connect with colleagues, rather than how I use Web2.0 with students. Those of you who know my work situation will be aware that I am not currently in the position to develop very much on the teaching side - but I am saving up loads of ideas for the Autumn Term onwards!

I talked about the use of Twitter in the previous post on this subject, in terms of communication. But a really amazing example of collaboration happened yesterday!  Using Twitter, around 150 librarians joined together to discuss the use of Web2.0 by our professional body, CILIP. We were able to follow, to some extent, the meeting that was taking place at CILIP’s headquarters in London and discuss amongst ourselves. By using the tag #cilip2 in all of our tweets, it was then possible to follow what was going on. I used Twitterfall to track the tweets really easily. If you want another way of seeing part of the discussion then look here.

#cilip2 - Twitter Search

It felt very exciting  and groundbreaking to be able to take part - and I have found a lot of colleagues from other sectors to follow on Twitter. In fact, I am beginning to feel that my Twitter community is becoming my first “port of call” for professional development and information these days - there are so many brilliant people out there! And I am developing a Twitter addiction!

Here is a Wordle based on the #CILIP2 tweets:

From Dave & Bry on Flickr

That leads me on to the second Web2.0 tool that I want to talk about here. Some years ago, when I still ran Strongest Links (for those of you who don’t know, that was a site I ran to support UK school librarians), I heard about wikis. I thought that a wiki would be a great tool for school librarians to use to share information and ideas. So, I set up a wiki and loads of people signed up - but, very few people actually put on any content. I think that it was a bit before its time.

SLNers - A Network for school librarians in the UK

Recently, a group of us took part in an online course (mentioned in previous posts) and, as a result, one librarian, Yin Doran, set up a Ning for us. Now - that is beginning to take off! I think that she chose the right technology at the right time - key to success! We can discuss things on the Ning and add files, photos and videos. I think that it enables a greater depth of discussion than can be achieved on a large mailing list like SLN. Also, so far, it has tended to attract librarians who are trying to work at a level beyond the basic stuff. Yes, we are all at different places in our learning curves, but we are trying to lift our eyes above the daily, mundane tasks, which we all have to do, and push things forward. I have also started a discussion on the Ning called “Twitter Helpdesk” to support colleagues finding their way on to Twitter.

Please, no Dewey questions!

Before I return to considerations of Web2.0, I am going to divert here towards a really interesting afternoon spent visiting the library at a local university. Many thanks to the lovely staff there who made me so welcome. Please note that any photos on this post are not of the library I visited today.

Sesame Library by Jim Bob Blann on Flickr

My first ever library post was as Graduate Trainee at Lancaster University Library back in 1979-1980! In those days we were in the early stages of automation - each book had a piece of punched card inside - about 10cms long. To issue a book, we had to take the student’s card - which also had holes in it - and put it through a reader. Then we had to push the piece of card through after it (I think I am remembering this correctly - it was a long time ago!). As the card often got scruffy, we had to learn how to read the holes and work out the numbers that they represented. One of my favourite jobs was the afternoon I spent each week with the techies. They were developing the next stage of computerising the library - barcodes!

Anyway, that diversion, within a diversion, just goes to show quite how old I am!

What I am leading up to is how far things have changed. I last walked into a university library probably in 1981, when I was finishing my Masters at Sheffield. Today, I walked into the most wonderful library space - I was almost jealous of the students for having such an amazing place in which to study!

So then I am thinking about my tiny library space in my new school - well, in comparison to a university library, all of my school libraries have been tiny! You would think that I had nothing in common with the library staff - how could I?

Well, that would be wrong! First of all, we are fellow-professionals and we speak a lot of the same language. We could relate to some of the same issues as librarians in an institution concerned with teaching and learning.

I went there to make a link and to talk about how we, as school librarians, can better prepare students for their time at university. I also had some idea what I would hear as I often read about the concerns of colleagues in the wider profession. These seemed to be the main issues.

On arrival at university, many students:

• Do not have an understanding of how to appraise resources. They do not have a concept of authority or trusted high quality resources. They think that a blog (written by anyone), a peer-reviewed journal article and a book are all equal.
• Have not gone beyond Google in terms of search engines before. Many still use Wikipedia uncritically.
• Have never used a subscription database - and wouldn’t know what one is anyway. The university invests a huge amount in high quality online resources, e-journals and e-books!
• Have never used journals.
• Have never read around their subject and baulk at essential reading lists.
• Are shaky when it comes to writing an academic essay.
• Have issues with plagiarism - not unexpected!
• Also have issues around understanding what a library is - as a public shared space. So they see nothing wrong with imposing themselves on other’s space in terms of noise, use of mobile phones and MP3 players, use of laptops, eating and drinking etc. They also have no idea of security - leaving their belongings around.
• Issues around use of ICT - using each other’s passwords or library cards.

There were lots of interesting features of the library in terms of design that confirmed some of what I am planning for our refurb - although I am more than embarrassed to compare the two! The sockets set into the floor, flexible seating, laptops, for example. It has also made me think that my idea for the classroom space (which we will incorporate into the library in 3-5 years), might be a good one: that we don’t take down the wall, but keep it as a bookable small room with IWB, laptops and flexible seating. That way it can be used for small group work, meetings etc., and the main library can have contrasting uses. For example, when we have a class in the main library, the smaller room could be used for quiet study; when we want quiet in the main library, the smaller room could be used for a group booking. The university library had a wonderful array of different kinds of space: ICT suites, group meeting rooms, areas with traditional study tables, areas with coffee bar style tables and chairs, zones with settees, and so on. This caters for the wide-ranging learning styles of today’s students.

I wish my library were a Tardis!

TARDIS by Dave Pearson on Flickr

Anyway, to finish, there are so many opportunities here for school librarians! Not only can we collect this kind of evidence about modern HE students and use it to convince our schools that we have a major role to play. We can also take heart from the fact that we share so many issues with our larger “cousins”. And we can look at their good practice and use it to inform how we develop our own collaborative teaching but also how we design our library spaces for the future!

Both images from the Flickr site

This week, I am trying to sort out in my mind all of the amazing Web2.0 tools and apps I have been playing around with, how useful I think they are for my own work, what I need to do to get the best out of them and which ones I will try with teachers and students when I have the opportunity. It is a tall order as my head is buzzing with all of the new things that I find every day. But I think I need to slow down and take stock. I seem to be skimming the surface and moving on again before I have really learned what each one can do.

A colleague, Caroline Roche in “Playing in my sandbox“, posted very wisely about this very thing on her blog - yes, I think that I am probably one of the “butterflies” in that I just play around with something for a while and then my attention is caught by a new thing to try! My husband has always said that I have a butterfly mind (wouldn’t mind the wings!)

Another librarian, Meredith Farkas in “Looking beyond the technolust“, has also recently written about those of us who are advocates for technology and our attitude to people who are maybe more measured in their approach to new things and ideas:

I think sometimes we all need to try and step outside of our personal feelings about these technologies, which isn’t easy when we think they’re the best thing since sliced bread. When we are talking to others about technology, we need to realize that what we find useful may not be useful to them (and that’s ok).

So, I need to think carefully when I advocate tools that I use myself - as many of you may not love them so much - and that is your prerogative!

The list here is very much a personal one. These are the things that are working for me at the moment!

Organising

To organise my working day, and sometimes my personal stuff I find Netvibes invaluable. I used to use Outlook and Pageflakes in my last job,  but we don’t use Outlook in my new school and Pageflakes got a bit flakey(!) recently.

The Librain’s Netvibe Pages

I have already posted about my use of Netvibes before, so I won’t repeat it all! But I do wonder what I will do if it goes!

Communication

Well, I still use email a lot - apparently younger people are moving away from it now. I don’t text very much as most of my family and friends don’t. I also don’t use my mobile phone very much either - this may cause some shock amongst readers!

I like email as I have a record of the correspondence, I can take the time to think about what I want to say, although I am known for jumping in a bit too quickly with it sometimes. I still have too many accounts - Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are old ones that I rarely use these days. My main account is Gmail, which I use for personal and semi-professional stuff and I also use the school official email. None of these are Web2.0, but email still forms the basis of my daily communications.

Twitter

Twitter is becoming a really important source of news, information, professional development, support etc. My Twitter network is growing, although I try to keep the number of those I follow to a reasonable number. I also stick to people who I think will be interesting and ignore those who lock down their tweets or who don’t have a profile. It will be interesting to see if I, and others, are using it to the same extent a year from now!

I am also experimenting with Meebo. I have this on my library website and have used it to communicate with some students - I am not sure about this and will think about the issues surrounding “chat” with young students. It was used successfully by a group of school librarians during a recent online course and I hope that we try it out as a group in the future.

Of course, blogging is also a way of communicating. I write something here and, if I am lucky, I get a response from other librarian colleagues that makes me think. Blogs are a wonderful way of sharing ideas - that’s why I have so many on my Netvibes page!

This post has been long enough and I will continue with other ways I use Web2.0 tools another day. I will cover collaboration, presentation, social bookmarking, note-taking, picture/photo sites, organising books, and maybe more as I think of categories!

Have just seen the site for the Your School Library Part II : Information Literacy with Web2.0 Course starting in June. This is the next course after the Transforming School Libraries one that many of us took part in earlier this year.

I am sure that I will be blogging about this extensively later on, but I just wanted to point out here the really neat way they have used Netvibes to create a website. I have been able to copy elements of this over to my own Netvibes pages so that I keep track of the development of the course.

I am really looking forward to it as they have some great speakers again!

Why not visit the site and sign up for the course when they open registration?